


Get with Child a Mandrake Root

by Vaznetti



Category: Miracles (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-18
Updated: 2007-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:58:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/pseuds/Vaznetti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A telephone call, a dead man, a trail that goes nowhere: Alva watches while Paul finds and loses and (perhaps) finds his father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get with Child a Mandrake Root

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Rez Lo for beta reading, to Vehemently for advice about Boston geography and housing, and to Hossgal and Cofax for questions about Catholic funerals. All remaining mistakes -- and I am sure there are many -- are my own fault.
> 
> Written for Nu Hiep

 

 

Evie prefers that Alva not answer the phone; he knows that she thinks he can't be trusted to speak to strangers. Alva sees it differently: he can't always be bothered to lie to people. He knows how easy to is to hold back one's own words, to twist them just enough to patch over the empty places in the world, to hide the gaps. Friends, of course, are another matter: he will lie to them and for them, without compunction.

So when the phone rings he lets Evie pick it up; every few months she will start using sentences with phrases like "not your secretary," in them, and he will get the phone before she can reach it. That usually lasts a week at most.

"No," Evie says, "Paul isn't available right now. May I take a message for him?" Alva gets up to stand in the doorway and listen; Evie rolls her eyes. It's a woman, then, and Evie is thinking of telling her that Paul has eloped with a nun and gone to spend the spring in Nepal. He's ready to go back to his desk and his book when she says, "Go on, please." It's not the words but the tone that tells him the call is important. She scribbles something on a pad. "Paul's father? No, of course." There's another pause. "That's--" She moves the phone away from her ear. "Did you get that?"

"I gather," Alva says, "that it was something to do with Paul's father."

"That was Claudia Blume, from City Hall. The woman Paul was working with, to find out about his parents. She says that the man Paul thinks may have been his father was found dead yesterday in his apartment." She's already on her feet to get her jacket. "Aren't you going to phone Paul?" she asks.

"Not yet," Alva says. "I want to know what this is, first."

First they drive to Medford, to the lower floor of a duplex, tidy and bare. Alva lets Evie talk them in, telling the owners of the upstairs flat -- a young couple, professionals, moved in last year -- that they're from Harper's lawyer, just checking the property. They shake their heads when he asks about Harper: quiet, they say, but he seemed well-liked in the neighborhood. Inside Harper's flat the furniture is worn, but the walls have been painted within the year and the kitchen linoleum is new. There are few photographs: one of a dark haired woman in the watery-bright colors of the late sixties, another of a different young woman, red-blond hair and a baby held on her lap, a few more of rows of grinning children in some kind of uniforms. Baseball, Alva things, or maybe softball; he can never be bothered to remember the difference. Evie stares at the picture of the woman with the baby. "Do you think?"

"I don't know," Alva says. He thought there would be some recognition here, some sense of a connection to Paul, but there's nothing. "I think I'd like to see Mr. Harper, though."

At the morgue, the sense of disconnection grows: he can see Evie staring as well, looking for Paul in the features of this gray-haired, pale-skinned man lying under his sheet. A small chin, a sharp nose. Nothing conclusive. "How did he die?" she asks.

The attendant looks at his clipboard. "Heart failure."

"Seriously?" Heart failure, Alva thinks. The diagnosis of last resort: he is dead, his heart no longer beats.

"Nothing suspicious." The attendant shrugs. "We're just holding the body until we track down the family."

"Does he have family?" Evie asks.

The door swings open and bangs shut as Paul strides into the room. "Me." He stares at them, blank and angry. "You were planning to tell me about this, weren't you?"

Evie's "Yes," clashes with Alva's "If necessary. Paul," Alva continues, "We don't know who this man is. We don't know whether he's your father or not."

"Let me see him." Paul's voice is brittle. The attendant motions him over. Paul's steps are slow, and he stares down at the body. "Should I recognize him?"

Evie comes around the table to stand next to him. "Have you ever seen him before?"

Paul shakes his head. "I feel like I ought to know, like I ought to feel something."

"There's no way that you could," Alva says. Paul glances up at him. Alva purses his lips: the problem with lying to your friends is that eventually they can tell when you're doing it.

* * *

Paul dreams that he is outdoors: it is the first warm day of spring, he has his sweater on his lap and his shirt sleeves rolled up. He's sitting on a bench in a park somewhere; there are six kids playing with a soccer ball and a woman jogging past with her dog.

Then the sun turns black, and clouds fill the sky, and a shadow comes reaching over the bench. He twists around to look at his father, and wakes.

* * *

They sit toward the back of the church, Paul between Alva and Evie as if they could hold him up with their shoulders. Alva watches the crowd come in: it is a crowd, middle-aged women with rings and rough hands, men with the veins bright on their cheeks. There's a woman with dark hair and a black dress sitting in the front row -- the sister, he thinks, flown in from Phoenix -- and behind her a group of gray women, the kind who never miss a funeral. They turn around and frown at the children in the church. A lot of children, Alva suddenly realizes. A lot of girls: children and teenagers with their mothers and fathers, and clumps of young women, on their own, scattered through the pews, shy in their dark dresses and strands of tiny pearls.

The service is simple; the priest says a few words about Harper, his hard work and his devotion to the community. Then there's the wait as people line up to take communion. Watching the slow progress Alva can hear his father sneering at it: magical thinking, he would have called it, meaning fakery. No room in his world for miracles of blood. Alva's frown tightens at the memory; then Paul jostles his shoulder and he turns to see Father Calero sliding into the pew from the outside aisle to sit by Evie.

Calero reaches across her to lay a hand on Paul's arm as they rise, and Paul leans over and asks how he knew they would be there. Calero glances at Evie. "I heard a rumor," he says. "Paul, this man -- you think he was your father?"

"I don't know," Paul says.

Calero nods. "You know there's a reception downstairs, after the mass."

"Would we be welcome?" Evie asks.

Calero scans the crowd. "I was just down there. They're going to need someone to eat all the food they'll have."

The hall is filling up by the time they get there, tables covered with lace cloths and crowded with plate after plate of food. Alva accepts a glass of whiskey in a paper cup and watches the room: Calero has gone to talk to the other priest, Paul near his side. Evie is by one of the tables, nodding at something she's being told by one of the older women.

"It's such a shame," a woman says. "I don't know what we'll do without him."

She has hair dyed red-brown and her eye on a clump of girls standing in the middle of the room. "Is one of them yours?" He lets his brogue sound a little more broadly; this isn't an Oxbridge sort of room.

The woman sighs. "Katie," she says. "In the blue skirt. Who knows if we'll find a new coach before spring? And Tom Harper was such a treasure. The girls loved him." Alva mutters some encouraging nonsense. It must have something to do with the team pictures on display, back at the apartment. "And you know," she says in a lower voice, "we all could trust him. All the parents. And where are we going to find that again, now?"

That's an opening. "There was never anything..." He trails off. "A single man, coaching young girls?"

"No, nothing," she says firmly. "He grew up in my own old neighborhood."

It's not the sort of proof against darkness Alva would trust, but she seems convinced. A few more questions at last yields the word 'softball,' but by then Evie is walking across the room, heading right for him. She smiles at the woman as she takes Alva's arm. "We need to find Paul," she says. "Excuse us."

Alva's got as much information as he's going to; he lets Evie lead him away. "I think he's with Father Calero," he says.

He is: they're both in the kitchen, with four of the older women. "Paul, when were you born?" Evie asks.

"Seventy-three," Paul says. "Why?"

"Thomas Harper was working in Chicago from 1963 to 1976."

"That's not... how is that possible?"

"It's true," says one of the women. "He was working out there, but then, after Jeannie and the baby... Well, he wanted to come home, to be with his own people."

"Jeannie?" Paul asks.

"His wife," says one of the other women. "He met her out there, and they had a little girl. There was a car accident -- anyway, he lost them both."

"He never got over it," says the first woman. "And he was so good with those girls he coached. He was always... well, you know. They were like his own family."

Paul has gone very pale. "I think I--"

"You need some air," Calero agrees.

The women fuss and point to the kitchen door; a short hallway leads out into the bright air, with the church looming up beside them. Paul leans against the wall and looks down. "He might have come back here," he says. "For a visit. Something might have-- He might not have known."

"He was looking for a family," Evie says. "He wouldn't have hidden from you." Alva nods; here, in the moment of denial, he sees the relationship most clearly. The orphaned Paul has always made connections easily, to Alva's eyes, surrounding himself with friends and new-made family, looking for the parents he lost but never alone without them. It's a talent Alva envies, and finds himself drawn to.

"But he sealed the file," Paul says. He lifts his head. "Do we have a photograph? I need to talk to Claudia."

"We have one in the office," Alva says. "You want to see if he was the man she met."

"At least I'll know," Paul says. "At least I'll know something."

* * *

Paul dreams again: the sky is blazing with stars over his head. He stands on a plain, the ground dry under his feet, and stares up. He has never seen so many stars, so much brightness, and he thinks he can hear the echo of music in their geometric movements. The earth stretches away from him, rolling gently to the horizon. He stands in timelessness and watches the stars dance.

On his left hand, fire blazes on the horizon: the sun, rising without warning, turning the fire-studded blackness blue. He's still staring upward as the stars begin to fall, screaming as they come.

* * *

"You can't both come in," Paul says on the steps. "We'll overwhelm her."

"She's not supposed to talk to you at all," Evie points out, but Paul says _please_ , in that tone, and she relents. "We'll wait down here," she agrees. He's gone before she can say anything else. "So," she says to Alva.

"You spoke to Calero," he says. He can't quite resent the decision.

"I've started to go to mass again."

"Oh." Her face is serene as always, as if she doesn't expect him to think anything of it, as if she thinks he won't want to say _you feel it coming too_.

"It would have made my grandmother happy," she says. "And I guess it sets a good example for Matty."

"And that's all?" Alva folds his arms across his chest.

She sighs. "You think it's real. That there's something happening. One of your events." She turns to look at him. "And it has something to do with Paul."

"What do you think?" Alva asks.

She looks down. "When I was on the force I wanted to be a detective, someday. There's a crime, and you find out who's guilty. It's clean, in a way: the guilty and the innocent, the living and the dead."

"And going to mass gives you that?" As soon as the question leaves his tongue he wishes he hadn't asked it, or not in that tone; there's more of his father in him than he'd like.

"No," she says. They're silent until Paul comes back down the stairs.

They can see the answer on his face as he hesitates a few steps above them; Evie walks up to him and when he says something about seeing them later, she takes his arm. "That's not why we came with you." She guides him down the steps, then through the maze of streets down past Faneuil Hall, to the wharves.

They find a bench and settle, oblivious to tourists and vendors both. "She'd never seen him before," Paul says, staring out at the water. "I don't-- why would someone do that? Use a false name and address?"

"I don't know," Alva says.

"Why does it matter, if I find my father or not?"

"I don't know, " Alva says again, but he's thinking of dreams and prophecies, water turned to blood, midnight at noon.

"And he wasn't even my father," Paul adds. "He couldn't have been."

"Paul," Evie says.

"You saw him. You were at the funeral, you heard the parents, those kids. Evie was right. He was looking for a family, himself. I think he would have wanted to know... to know me."

"He was like you," Evie says.

"Claudia says that the man she met was nothing like me." He's silent a little while. "Maybe I was never meant to find him."

"Is that what you think?" Paul gives him a sour look, a look that says, _don't lie to me_. Alva sighs. "If I knew anything that could help you," he says, "you know I would share it." There are too many variables: God is here, or God is nowhere; the dark wants Paul, or is vulnerable to him; Paul needs his father, or Paul can never find his father.

"You're thinking abut the dreams," Paul says. "Like Danielle Franklin. That maybe I should never meet my father."

"I've been considering them, yes," Alva says.

"I've been dreaming, too," Paul says.

Alva's mouth goes dry; he wishes that his mother had said something more than just his name. Something like, _get your medical degree_ , or _don't take the Harvard job_ , or whether Paul Callan was dangerous or not. "Really?" he says.

Paul nods. "I meet my father, and the world changes. Or it changes just before, just as I turn around, or look up, or... Night turns to day and day to night. I don't know what it means."

On Paul's other side, Evie is still. Even the dreams are inconclusive, Alva thinks, poor informants. The only thing he feels sure of is that whoever he may be, Paul's father still lives. No need to warn against impossible futures, surely. He looks up from his hands to find Paul staring at him. "What?" he asks.

"I was waiting for you to come up with something."

"A lie, you mean?" Paul shrugs. "I don't have anything."

"You could request a DNA test," Evie says. "With Harper's address on the file, there's enough reason to request one."

"The folder was missing," Paul says. "I asked Claudia, and she couldn't find it. There's no record that it ever existed. It doesn't matter, anyway. Harper wasn't my father."

"You're sure," Evie says.

"Why would I be dreaming? Why would I be warned about something that couldn't happen?"

Paul's answer echoes his own thoughts, but Alva can't help arguing. "You know as well as I that the dead can reach out to us, and we to them."

There's a small smile on Paul's face. "Are you suggesting a séance?"

Alva very nearly says that, at least on isolated occasions, such practices have been proved effective. Instead, he says, "No. But--"

"No," Paul says. He pushes himself up from the bench. "Come on, guys. I read about a set of grave desecrations in Putnam: three bodies dug up and burned."

"Really?" Alva says as he and Evie follow. "You know, salt and fire are claimed to be effective in laying unquiet spirits..."

* * *

Three months later, Alva accepts an invitation to address a seminar on spiritualism at the University of Chicago Divinity School; the next day, before his flight back to Boston, he takes the bus up to the Loop and spends the morning looking for the Harpers: Catherine, born on the 22nd of April, 1973, to Thomas and Jean Harper. There's an address, but he knows there's no point in looking it up. Catherine and Jean Harper, died December 3rd, 1975; they were walking down the street when a car skidded on ice and plowed into them. He's ready to go when his eye catches the next name on the computer screen: Paul Harper, same date of birth as Catherine, same parents. He stares at it: it does not change.

They had celebrated Paul's birthday in February. Evie brought cupcakes to the S.Q. office, and Paul and Matty blew the candles out together. Paul made a joke of the day. "Poppi assigned them at random to fill in the gaps between the kids who knew their birthdays," he said. "Every few weeks we'd get a little party."

There's no sign that Paul Harper was with his mother and sister on the day they died; there's no mention of him at all. Another search, and Alva finds the answer: another death certificate, April 23, 1973, for Paul Harper, a doctor's signature smudged and unreadable at the bottom.

Alva stares at the screen until his watch tells him that if he doesn't move he'll miss his plane. That, he thinks, would require explanations; as it is he can provide a few anecdotes about academics, enough to satisfy both Paul and Evie.

That night Alva dreams: he and Paul are on a train. He stares out the window, sees the fens all around him, Ely Cathedral rising up out of the flatness like a huge gray ghost hovering on a distant green mist. They're leaving Cambridge, then, he thinks, heading north, maybe to catch the train to Edinburgh. "I dreamed that you were dead," he says to Paul.

"I've been dead twice," Paul says. "A night and a day and a night. Someday I'll be dead again."

It makes sense to Alva, and he settles back into his seat. On the other side of the aisle, Evie is holding Matty, pointing out the window at the sheep in the green fields. Father Calero sits across from her. "Are we all going home?" Alva asks.

"Wait and see," Paul says.

End.

 

 

 


End file.
